Every psychologist has a set of guiding principles to their practice. Here are mine, and I hope that they give a sense of the kind work that I do, and chance to think about whether I would be a good fit to meet your needs and expectations.

Collaborative working

Focusing on solutions

Evidence based approaches

Goodness of fit

Parents are only part of the complex story

Collaborative
working: Parents are the experts of their own child

I love the
continuous learning that is required to be a psychologist. I have a constantly
growing library of books that help me understand the challenges that many
children and parents have and how to overcome them. But these books do not
necessarily make me more of an expert than a parent for his or her child. I
know classification systems and lots of theories of child development and while
that gives me insight to many children’s challenges – parents are the experts
of their own child. Together we can work collaboratively to help your child
overcome their challenges and and help them thrive.

Focusing on
solutions

Many
therapists believe that is important to sort out the problems of the past to be
able to live in the now and the future. Though I do not disagree with such an
approach, my preference is to focus more on solutions and talk less about
problems. In my experience, thinking about what has worked well in the past
tends to be more constructive than talking about problems and that especially
seems the case with children and adolescents.

An evidenced
based approach

I love
science and the empirical method, and that is the approach I take whenever
possible in understanding a child or family’s needs and in how I implement
interventions. I root the work I do in
as much evidence as is available. When there is insufficient research to guide
the child and family’s needs, I work collaboratively with the parents to find
solutions that best fit their unique set of circumstances.

Goodness of
Fit

This is an
important idea in developmental psychology – that irrespective of a child
having a specific diagnosis, the key thing to assess is the fit between the
child and their school and home environments. I believe that many conflicts
arise out of a poor fit between the child and their surrounding environment. The
key to finding solutions is to help teachers and parents in the child’s
environment to adapt to the child’s needs, as well as helping the child to adapt
to his/her setting.

Parents are
only one part of the complex story

A child’s
personal narrative is constructed of so many more threads than just their
parents and how they are parented.Genetics
and the whims of biology, along with the many relationships that children form throughout
their lives, are just as important threads as parents. Similarly one cannot
underestimate the importance of specific dramatic situations and environments
in the child’s life, both for the good and for the bad. The key thing is to
consider all the threads of the child’s individual tapestry, to see the
richness of the whole story – and thus the whole child -- rather than looking
at individual pieces or factors in the child’s life.